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Session Chair Instructions

We are extremely grateful for your willingness to chair a session/panel at the Surviving Peak Drought and Warming workshop Thursday March 29th and Friday morning of March 30th 2018.

We have a mix of paper presentations and panels. We hope you will keep people to time and help generate a lively discussion. Almost all sessions and panels are for an hour.

Paper sessions [Sessions 1,2, 4, 6, and 7: Most paper sessions have 3 or 4 talks. We have asked speakers to talk for no more than 10 minutes so that there is time for discussion (we would like 5-10 minutes for audience questions and discussions. We suggest you save audience questions for after all papers in the session have been presented, and any discussants have made remarks (we will ask discussants to talk for no more than 2-3 minutes each). Where there are 3 presenters you might let them talk a little longer but it will be nice to have time for audience discussion. If no one has questions you might want to have a couple prepared in advance - see below for some possible ideas.

Panel sessions [Sessions 3, 5, 8, and 9]: Panels have 3-5 participants. We ask panelists to talk for up to 5 minutes on what peak drought and warming might mean for their sector, place or group of concern. As chair you might want to begin with a few remarks or questions to the panel, and also have some questions in case audience does not have questions. See below for ideas. Feel free to add your own perspective.

The biggest challenge will be to move our participants away from their narrower climate change research and interests to the larger questions of how we in the Southwest and elsewhere respond to the challenge of a temperature that is continuing to rise (probably above well above 2°C/3.5°F in the SW) with associated drought risks, and will reach a peak before (hopefully) returning to 2°C or 1.5°C.

What are the implications of this overshoot? Can everyone/everything make it through peak drought and temperature? How will we experience the ‘shoulders’ as we reach the peak and come down again? What sorts of adaptations will be needed? Will we face limits to adaptation? What are the climate justice implications? How do we communicate these risks? What are the research gaps?

You may wish to reach out to the members of your panel to coordinate themes or topics. Please email jpearl@email.arizona.edu to get a list of contacts of those in your session.

Thank you again for your participation. Let us know if you have questions.